Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to electronic communications and more particularly to soliciting and facilitating a response to an electronic communication.
Electronic communications such as emails, Instant Messages (IMs), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messages, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, Multimedia Message Service (MMS) messages, etc. can be sent and received in a variety of one-to-one, one-to-many, or other fashions. To generalize the most common uses of various electronic communication channels such as email, senders can use emails or other electronic communications to compose and send messages to one or more other users that may or may not require replies. Each receiver receives and reads the message and can reply to the message with an answer that may or may not require further reply. So, for example, the sender can send a message that requests some information or feedback from a number of users, which may be the base for further decisions the sender needs to make. In this case, the sender composes and sends an email or other message to a group of recipients and waits until they respond. After receiving responses, it is the sender who is responsible for collecting all the answers and processing them.
These types of communications can be highly inefficient since the sender manually collects the responses, reads the individual responses and prepares the final statistics (e.g., 3 people said yes, 1 person said no, also received some comments). Sometimes this process is done formally, e.g., when the sender needs to create a formal report based on received input, or informally, e.g., when the sender just needs to know others' opinions. In any case, it is still the sender who needs to remember how many replies are expected, remind users to answer the emails, and spend a certain amount of time on tallying or otherwise compiling the final statistics. The recipients also need to spend some time to compose and type a reply to the sender.
Some methods of addressing these inefficiencies have been presented. These methods are web based approaches to send and manage various one-to-many communications such as polling, sending invitations, etc. To use these methods a user logs onto a website offered by a service for handling such communications. Through this service, the user can initiate communications to any number of recipients. Email messages to these recipients are sent by the service. The email messages include a link back to the service's website which provides, via one or more web pages, a number of options for responding to the original messages. The recipient responses can be accumulated by the service and presented to the original user via the other pages of the website.
However, such a system is not without some problems. First of all, the websites offered by such services typically require a user to subscribe to the service and are not available to those who are not or do not want to be subscribers. Second, being web-based, such services are not accessible or conveniently accessible to all devices. For example, a mobile device such as a cell phone may be able to receive various forms of messages such as emails but may not be able to view web pages. In other cases, viewing a web page through such a device may be inconvenient or burdensome due to the size of the screen of display on the device or other limitations of the device. Furthermore, since these methods rely on redirecting a recipient from the original email message to a website, they are inherently inefficient since a recipient cannot easily and quickly answer or reply to the message through the original message or channel.
Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems that allow for soliciting and facilitating a response to an electronic communication.